You can’t solve a problem until you understand it. When it comes to climate change, on a fundamental level we don’t really understand the problem.

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For some time now, I’ve been writing about the need to broaden our thinking about climate. That includes our role in changing it and the profound challenges those changes pose to our rightly cherished “project” of civilization.

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Today, I want to sharpen the point.

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But the part of climate change we’ve failed to culturally metabolize is the meaning of what’s happening to us and the planet.

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In other words, what we don’t get is the true planetary context of the planetary transformation human civilization is driving. Getting this context right is, I think, essential and I’m dedicating most of the year to writing a book on the subject. The book’s focus is what I believe should be a new scientific (and philosophical) enterprise: the astrobiology of the Anthropocene.

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The Holocene has been a good time for human civilization to emerge and thrive. The seasons have been pretty regular, moving between relatively mild boundaries of hot-ish and cold-ish. That transition was the key change and allowed humans to get stable and productive agriculture started.

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But, thanks to civilization, the Holocene is now at an end. That’s where the story gets really interesting and where the Anthropocene makes its entrance.

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Scientists now recognize that our impact on Earth has become so significant we’ve pushed it out of the Holocene into the Anthropocene, an entirely new geological epoch dominated by our own activity (see Andy Revkin’s reporting on the subject). And it’s not just about climate change. Human beings have now “colonized” more than 50 percent of the planet’s surface. And we drive flows of key planetary substances, like potassium, far above the “natural” levels.

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Astrobiology is fundamentally a study of planets and their “habitability” for life. But sustainability is really just a concern over the habitability of one planet (Earth) for a certain kind of species (homo sapiens) with a certain kind of organization (modern civilization). That means our urgent questions about sustainability are a subset of questions about habitability. The key point, here, is the planets in our own solar system, like Mars, show us that habitability is not forever. It will likely be a moving target over time. The same idea is likely true for sustainability and we are going to need a plan for that.

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Woody and I are not the only ones thinking about astrobiology and the Anthropocene. David Grinspoon, a highly-respected planetary scientist has also been pursuing his own line of inquiry on the issue. As the Library of Congress’s chair of astrobiology, Grinspoon began exploring his questions with experts in fields as diverse as history and ecology. His new book The Earth In Our Hands gives a beautiful and detailed overview of the ways we must change our thinking if we want to truly understand the transformation in our midst.

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In our 2014 paper, Woody and I presented an outline for this kind approach. One can ignore science fiction issues about alien sociology and just ask physics i.e. thermodynamic kinds of questions.

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If young civilizations use some particular energy modality (combustion, wind, solar, etc.) what will the feedback on their planet look like? (By the way, as we’ve discussed before, there is always a planetary feedback when using lots of energy for large-scale civilization building. No free lunches folks. Sorry).

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Woody and I sketched out the kind of behaviors you might expect from this kind of modeling. Considering just population, energy use and planetary feedback, one can imagine models showing trajectories of history that lead to collapse or to sustainability.

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Which path a civilization finds itself on will depend on the parameters for their planet and the energy modalities (sources) they’re using (or switching between). Of course, the models I am building are not reality. But they can prove to be a huge help in understanding the interplay of forces that shape the fate of planetary-scale civilizations like ours. In the end, this kind of understanding can help us at least understand what we’re up against. Are we doomed, or is there a lot wiggle room in the choices we have to make?

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The complete article may be read at the URL above.

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Earth in human hands : the rise of terra sapiens and hope for our planet